Mother’s Day Gifts for Writers

First things first. We’ll start with greeting cards, as no gift is complete without them. I picked a two floral designs. There are many more types of cards to choose from on Zazzle: whimsical, vintage, collage-style, and so on.

There are many designs on Zazzle aimed at writers. One of my favorites is “Don’t forget to write.” If your Mom is a busy person and making a living using the computer for work that takes her away from her passion, you can use this mug to encourage her to spend more time writing, particularly if you feel she’s really good at it. She will appreciate the message. It’s also a nice statement if you know she feels you’re not calling her often enough: you’re returning the message in a way, reinterpreting it. She’ll enjoy it.

Another design I really like has the statement “To write or not to write. Is that a trick question?” If your mother feels compelled to write and is always typing away at her computer, then she will appreciate your mug and the fact that you understand that for her writing is a way of life – the only way of life she can be happy with.

If for your writer Mom writing is a badge of honor, she might appreciate a writer's T-shirt.

Here's a less conspicuous design with a quote about writers: “Writers give shape to questions so you can find some (other) answers.” It celebrates writers and artists, both of whom enrich our lives in such an important way. Books and films throw not so much answers as questions at us, making us reflect on many things that would otherwise stay off our radar. It also makes us appreciate the many good things we have in our lives, see them for what they are when we’re taking them for granted.

I have always appreciated fun mousepad designs, and always felt that too few of them were readily available in stores -- so I'm glad we now have Zazzle. There are a gazillion mousepads on that website, and if that's not enough, you can make your own.

The one I'm showing to the right is quite popular on Zazzle. Remember you, too, can become a designer there, making and selling custom-made products.

If you want to give her a paperback, she might enjoy reading one of the top 100 bestsellers in women's fiction, as listed by Amazon.

Jewelry and perfume are trickier than books, and that extends not only to the choice of perfume, but also to the choice of buying it in a department store or online. Several people are complaining on Amazon that what they bought online from this company is not the real thing in that it won’t last. So maybe it’s wiser to go to an actual shop, although I expect the merchandise you buy there and the perfumes you get on Amazon come from the same distributors.

Same thing for jewelry. You could get it online, but, unless you find some great deals on Amazon (and you will find a number of those), it might be a good idea to buy jewelry at a local jewelry store.

What you can easily get online without worrying about anything related to the product is a photo camera. I have recently bought a Canon PowerShot S110. It has 12.1 MP and a 5x optical zoom with a 24 mm-120 mm (wide-angle) lens. It has the ability to shoot RAW and you can choose various aspect ratios as well: 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, 1:1, and 4:5. It also shoots Full HD video. All these amazing features are packed into a small body that you can easily carry around in a small women’s purse. With this camera, if your mother is not yet a photo enthusiast, she will soon become one.

Still, there’s a drawback. I’m not very happy with the way this camera renders the whites. Other than that though, it's great, offering so much! But as far as whites go I’m much happier with an older camera, released in 2005, namely Canon 350D or Digital Rebel XT. I’m showing below some photos taken with this camera. It’s a DSLR camera that comes with a 18-55 mm lens. You may want more zoom – then you can get other lenses. Also, it doesn’t shoot video. But as far as the photos go, they are wonderful. I’ve photographed the occasional wedding with this camera and got the wedding dresses in wonderful whites. Same with white flowers. See below some photos of beanstalk leaves and flowers taken last summer with my Canon Digital Rebel XT / 350D.

Update: In the meantime, Canon has released a much improved version of the Powershot S110 camera: the Powershot SX720 HS model. It comes with 20.3 MP and a 40x optical zoom. Its image sensor and DIGIC 6 image processor may have very well solved the problem discussed above (about the white shades). There's also now a wonderful version in the Rebel series, the Canon EOS Rebel T8i, which shoots 4K video.

Finally, another small gift your writer mother might like. If she likes tea and her friends, that is. It’s a tea cup with the quote "Friends and tea make a sweet combination."

Writers enjoy lying down with a good book after they have done their work for the day, so if your mother is a writer, she will enjoy a pillow reading “Oh, for tea, a nook, and a good book,” which is riff on a line from a poem by one of several writers called John Wilson. The longer quote goes like this:

“Oh for a book and a shady nook,
Either indoors or out,
with the green leaves whispering overhead,
or the street cries all about.
Where I may read at all my ease
both of the new and old,
For a jolly good book whereon to look
is better to me than gold”

It’s a fact universally acknowledged that writers are bound to use pretty much everything they experience in their writing, in one form or another. In the words on the bumper sticker below, “Careful, or you’ll end up in my novel.” If you don’t want to get your mother a bumper sticker but you like the statement, you can get her a mug with the same words. It would be a nice accessory on her desk as she meets with friends and family at her place.

And if your mother is environmentally conscious and a lover of oceans and seas and their marine life, you could get her a fun present with which she could raise awareness of issues important for her. Here's an all-over-print tank top with one of my designs about marine life in coral reefs, complete with photos of organisms such as nudibranch, including Chromodoris nudibranch (sea slugs), crab, parrot fish, yellow tang fish, sea anemone, clownfish, orange-lined and clown triggerfish, lionfish (Pterois), miniatus grouper (coral grouper), jewelled blenny (Salarias Fasciatus), sergeant major fish, copperband and lemon butterflyfish, sea turtles, seahorse, octopus, crab, starfish (sea star), and many varieties of coral. 

I hope my gift suggestions have been helpful. Hope your mother has a happy Mother’s Day!